If that happens, the "Pride of the Yankees" will simply be a 1942 movie featuring Walter Brennan, before he became Amos McCoy.
If that happens, it will be the second time in the last 10 years that a bona fide star on a career-Yankee path will have walked away from New York City, with the most lucrative and loyal fan base in sports.
But if that happens, it will not be a mere re-enactment of the Robinson Cano debacle. This won't be the loss of a guy who jogged out grounders. This will be the loss of a de facto Yankee captain - of the heart of our team on multiple levels.
If the Yankees lose Judge, the atrophy of the franchise as an American cultural benchmark will be nearly complete. They will lose their city to the Mets. They will lose their once-dynastic legacy to the Dodgers, or whatever teams bypass them next year in the standings.
The forecast today in San Francisco: 60 and sunny.
Today, the future of the Yankees is dangling on a thread. There is no Plan B.
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22 comments:
Just in, Hal increased his offer to Judge. It's now $31.50hr, rumor is he'll go as high as $35hr.
$35 an hour is good money. He'd be crazy to turn that down. What's he think he's gonna get? $40? $42?
He's a great player, but he's no graphic designer.
I hope Fiscal Hal realizes Judge is his best employee, better than all the stuffed suits and the soccer guys and Cashstrapped and better than anyone else he pays including himself.
Walter Brennan didn't really limp, his Grandpappy Amos character did. Same as Dennis Weaver's Chester stiff-leg. Character physical gimmicks were apparently a big thing at one time. Hugh Laurie's House character walked with a cane but it was a part of the plot; he was crippled by something, my daughter would know the something, and it wasn't by his participation in the shitty remake of the fantastic 1965 Flight Of The Phoenix, although it would have been fair for the show's producers to make him carry that cane around for that reason.
I love San Francisco by the way. My wife's former employer is based there and they offered and begged her many times to take "big promotions" to come out to the home office to be this or that, but my wife is an "East Coast Person" who "likes Sausalito but could never live there", so my ashes will one day be scattered over the Susquehanna River rather than the Pacific Ocean. I won't care of course. I always understood her reasoning; she has family in New Jersey she's close to while I on the opposite hand have family in western Pennsylvania I'm not close to. No regrets though, but I admit I do get wistful sometimes on those cold and windy February nights out on the tractor clearing snow drifts from the thousand foot driveway.
It's going to come down to where his wife wants to live. If she wants to be in the Bay Area near her friends and family, then that's what he'll pick.
It was his favorite team growing up. If the $ are the same or close I think he has to jump.
If the situation were reversed for any one of us, and we were a superstar on the Giants and we had a chance to become Yankees (for roughly the same money) I'm thinking we would all do it.
Add the insulting initial offer and general ineptitude of the Yankee FO and this seems like a fait accompli.
I know what you mean, Mildred. I think it is the most naturally beautiful city in America. My wife has relatives out there, and we visit sometimes, but no chance we would move.
Maybe if Judge leaves...
Mildred -
I love SF as well. I lived in a small one bedroom apartment in Pacific Heights. It used to make me happy just walking to the corner store to get the paper. Met my wife there. Had our first born there as well.
The city is not doing well right now. The homeless situation is out of control, as is the cost of living. For example, my $750 a month apartment is now over $4K.
Someone had the stupid idea of creating "Safe Zones" to shoot up drugs etc. It's worse than it was under Willie Brown.
There's no middle class. Just the seriously well off and the dirt poor with the service people all forced to live with many roommates. A dystopia.
That said, the Judges will be able to afford it.
Sausalito on the other hand is still gorgeous. As is the rest of Marin.
I think if I were Judge, I'd ask myself:
One way or the other, I'm going to be an incredibly rich individual for the rest of my life.
So...do I want to spend my remaining playing years with a team that keeps declining mostly because the owner refuses to make any changes in management—and where the focus of the fans' displeasure will increasingly be ME as I age and my own skills inevitably decline? OR...do I want to play on a perennial World Series contender?
I think if I were Judge, I'd want to take a hard look at the Dodgers' and Giants' rosters, front offices, and farm systems, and talk to the people running both teams, to ask them where they see their franchises going over the next 5-10 years and how they intend to get there.
I think their answers will be a damned sight better than those of the Yankees'. Which is what worries me.
All too true about the conditions of the city, Doug. Though I feel much the same way about Manhattan. There is construction everywhere, more and more high-rise condos going up...and the streets are filthy, the subway deteriorating, the mentally ill homeless everywhere.
Though crime is up, it's still only a small fraction of what it was in the 1980s. It's more that everything just feels directionless and out of control.
I'm not sure who the city is for anymore, or what it's for.
"I'm not sure who the city is for anymore, or what it's for."
Poetically said and all too true.
I'm currently reading "The World We Make" by N. K. Jemisin. It's the second book of a SF duology with "The City We Became". About New York as embodied by, I guess they are deities of sorts, that represent the boroughs.
I'm doing a poor job of conveying what the books are about but in many ways the main struggle in the books is the struggle you described above. "who the city is for anymore, or what it's for."
Jimmy -
We're not saying it's a factor in Judge's decision. His wealth and status places him on another level no matter where he goes.
we're just discussing the state of two great cites that we both love and what we are observing. It's no longer strictly a baseball conversation.
Jimmy
LA - Another city that I lived in (for 14 years) has it's own share of issues. But, even when I lived there - and to be clear I enjoyed my time there immensely, - it never felt like a city in the traditional sense (because it's not).
New York and San Francisco have a similar feel to them. On some levels it's just a matter of scale.
It's old hat but you don't walk LA. You very much walk the other two. LA lack vibrancy. It has many, many other things going for it but it doesn't hum.
The Yankees as a top organization, has been declining for years. It is the Genius Cashman way to allow Yankees top players to test free agency. Except if the player is Barren Hicks. And then to resign him. Now The Yankees will hold on to this utter stiff because Hal is paying him. The Yankees and loads of sports commentators defend Cash. He is highly overrated and has done damage to the Yankees franchise. Yet, he stays. Judge might be a Giant or a Dodger. He probably sees the way the Yankees conduct bus8iness. No World Series in 2023 and beyond.
NYC has had glass condos sprouting everywhere for almost 20 years now. They've even reached the Bronx along the Major Deegan. But I haven't noticed any increased problems with the subway, and the homeless will always be with us, I'm afraid. Still far less than the 80s, and crime peaked in the early 90s with crack. The "increase in crime" in Manhattan is certainly overblown and bullshit. It's still an incredibly safe city, as it has been for a decade or two. A few violent crimes get a lot of publicity, and suddenly Fox News is a-skeered to go outside.
The city is fine, and I know precisely who it's for now. The young and the rich. Somehow, I'm hanging in, but that won't last forever. It's been said that every New Yorker falls in love with the city he or she moved to, and as it changes their love fades and they don't like the changes. I'm that way, but I'm still surprised at how much some neighborhoods haven't changed, at least in terms of the buildings. And I have to say, Hudson River Park is awesome. Nice move there.
Off topic here, but didn't know where else to pose this, and I have great respect for the collective wisdom expressed here. Does anyone know if John & Suzyn have been renewed for next year (and beyond??) yet, or when they might be? I'm a diehard radio listener, and can't imagine a Yankees season w/o them in the booth, although I know, realistically, that it is always looming.
Judge should ask himself this question...what team gives me the best chance to win a ring? Because he will get paid regardless...
SF, LA or NYY or NYM.
A few of us Marin County-Yankee fans have reached out to Judge because we want to buy him a few beers while he's out here and try to persuade him to stay . . . a Yankee.
Sadly, he hasn't responded yet.
Hopefully a cranky old, senile limo driver takes Judge down to Candlestick and leaves him there by mistake.
There never was a Plan B. Never will be. I don't think there's a Plan A to be honest.
Good points all around, JM. Much of the "rise" in crime is how to lie with statistics. "Subway crime up 33 percent from last year..."(And nothing on how ridership is up, say, 66 percent from last year.)
But that said, there do seem to be a lot of mindless, violent incidents going on. Too many guns, too many bored teens with nothing they believe in or hope for; too many crazy people on the streets.
Subway service is below what it was, and small shops have gone down left and right. You're right, there are many things better than what the city had when I moved here in the 1970s. But many things are worse, too. It's a city that often looks like the Great Depression on the ground floor, and the Gilded Age above it. Increasingly, neighborhoods are hollowed out, and what's special and unique to the city has vanished.
A town for the rich and young? I don't think so. It's harder and harder for the young to live here, at least unless they are the young of millionaires.
And even the rich...don't live here in many cases. They just drop in to their otherwise empty condos for a couple months when they feel like it.
NYC was always divided between the Big City—international commerce, big finance, glamor, etc.—and the Little City, that made up of ten thousand thriving neighborhoods. The Little City is rapidly dying.
Reminds me of "Blade Runner".
NYC is teetering on the brink.
I still have several contacts in the City in business and the court system.
The subways are untenable and are really a driving force of the City. They are essential for the many workers who come from other parts of the City and the 'burbs.
The perception also is that you are unsafe on the streets.
You can blame Fox News for always talking about it, but pedestrians do not feel safe.
Tourism is down by a fair margin, with inflation contributing, and if Wall Street money ever relocates, the City will collapse.
Meanwhile the Mayor and Gov talk a good game.
I used to spend a decent amount of money there every year, but haven't been back since 2016.
I worked there for 3-1/2years from 1999-2003 and you felt comfortable there all the time, except for that period around 9/11.
Maybe the best thing for Hal is for Judge to leave. Maybe it will jolt him from his slumber, like waking up Godzilla.
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